“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. . . . The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.” ― Sam Shepard

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” ― Gustave Flaubert

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ― John Lennon

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” — Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” ― Albert Camus

“Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” ― Mark Twain

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.” ― Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song

“Live to the point of tears.” ― Albert Camus

“No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.” ― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Nick… I hope one day you find you a woman who loves you like my Melissa loved me. Whatever you do, boy, don’t turn your back on her. If she says she needs you for something, don’t matter how stupid it sounds or what deadline you got, you go to her and you do it. Screw work or whatever else. In the end, the only things that matter are the people in your life. The ones who make your life worth living and whose smiles light up your world. Don’t ever push them aside for fair-weather friends. Everything else is just cheap window dressing that you can replace. But once them people are gone…” He winced. “You can’t buy back time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get more of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes pity on no soul and no heart. And all those fools who tell you it gets easier in time are lying dumb-asses.
Losing someone you really love don’t never get easier. You just go a few hours longer without breaking down. That’s all… that’s all. – Bubba” ― Sherrilyn Kenyon

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” ― Woody Allen

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always … so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.” ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” ― James Joyce

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.” ― Tennessee Williams

“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic – now mercifully stilled, thank God – might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.” ― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.” ― Kahlil Gibran

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4 thoughts on “I Am Not Afraid…”

“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.” ― Kahlil Gibran

How did I let this comment go unanswered for so long. Love you loved the kittens made you feel squidgy. The Camus quote really was so well written. Couldn’t resist. Needed to share. Wish the same myself. Brilliant thought. Quite profound. I still am not completely sure what gave you the ah ha moment of inspiration, You accomplished so much since that moment. You will have to fill me in. Lastly, I think my next project to learn is how to make moveable gif.s. I really want to be able to do that. See them all the time on tumblr. That is a great blog site. I spend a fair amount of time there & follow a great many creative people that post the most unusual sources of inspiration & creativity. It is such a delight to visit. I want one or both of those kittens. I get squidgy, too. I think that is a British term you will have to explain to me. a.l. jk jennifer 😎

thought provoking

the secret keeper

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Cannabis Heals * It Does Not Produce Addicts * Government Has Been Lying For the Wealthy 1% who wanted the use of Cannabis gone * Cannabis was a threat * Cannabis can be used to create useful products * Nixon Lied * What a Surprise * He Buried the Report Cannabis Makes People Happy * FREE THE LEAF * MAKE IT LEGAL NATION WIDE * LEGALIZE NOW NOT TOMORROW * STOP TRYING TO CONTROL OUR BODIES THEY BELONG TO US * KEEP YOUR LAWS & HANDS OFF